The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation
The elders at our church are reading this book together, and two of them are in our supper club. One family graciously bought books for everyone to have, and we started reading it together two or three times a week after dinner. We're only in chapter 2 and we are getting so much out of it!
The basic premise is that character formation happens in the right brain, yet almost everything we do to promote spiritual growth in our churches is a left-brained activity. Michael Hendricks, the author, was the Spiritual Formation Pastor at his church. He wrote, "Most leaders, like me, have never developed their own maturity skills. Churches are filled with leaders who are gifted at theology, preaching, and vision-casting, but may not have relational and emotional skills." (p. 42) This hit us all between the eyes because it so perfectly describes the church we recently left more than any other toxic churches we've belonged to in the past.
Hendricks talked about Dallas Willard and his book The Great Omission, which I have actually read. "Dallas Willard wrote that pastors often focus on less important tasks and push aside the most important job of discipleship. This is a natural result of left-brained Christianity, which gravitates toward strategies that are measurable--number of dollars, number of people, number of campuses, number of small groups. The slow, messy work of character formation, which is hard to measure, is displaced by quantifiable goals." (p. 42)
Our previous pastor spent hours and hours with the elders working out a specific, detailed church discipline policy, so that there was no need to do the "slow, messy work".
We can't wait to read more of this book!
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